(also thank you for all you do here)
Not sure I understand what you're asking. Your post was fine and was not penalized (edit: sorry, this was not true—see below)—it's true that we downweight dupes, but once a year or more has gone by, we consider reposts to be dupes any more. Does that answer your question?
Edit: Oh, I get it now. Yes, I downweighted this thread as a follow-up, because it's obviously related to the Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) of Doge etc. In cases like that, follow-ups aren't the greatest posts; usually it's better to post the link as a comment in one of the other threads.
You can find lots of past explanation about this here:
major ongoing topics - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
downweighting follow-ups - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
However, I thought your submission was a good one, so I downweighted it quite a bit less than we normally would.